Are Clothing Companies Moving Fast Enough to Fix Factory Problems?

On Tuesday, the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety—made up of twenty U.S. and Canadian apparel companies, including Wal-Mart, Gap, and Macy’s—quietly issued a statement saying that the group had achieved a series of “critical milestones” to improve conditions in Bangladeshi clothing factories. To demonstrate its progress, the Alliance published a fifty-five-page draft set of standards for fire safety and the structural integrity of buildings.

Examine the details, however, and it seems that the Alliance is short of some of its own goalposts. In July, the group vowed publicly that, by this week, it would adopt a training curriculum on worker safety and “engage third parties to develop [a] training program”; Tuesday’s statement said representatives are “working to identify third parties in Bangladesh that can implement these training programs.” The Alliance also promised to compile inventories of the factories they contract with in Bangladesh and send those lists to the Fair Factories Clearinghouse, an industry-funded nonprofit that helps apparel companies share data on factory audits. On Tuesday, the group said it was “in the process” of meeting that milestone; the executive director of the clearinghouse, Peter Burrows, told me in an e-mail that he has received supplier lists from seventeen members of the Alliance, and that new members have sixty days to comply. Meanwhile, the building standards themselves are incomplete: the section on electrical safety is unfinished, and other important elements are missing, such as the allowed heights of buildings and a timeline for factories to install automatic sprinklers.

A person familiar with the Alliance, who said she was not authorized to speak publicly, said that the group feels confident it has met all its goals. It has created a short list of candidates to develop a training program and is consulting with outside groups about adopting a curriculum, she said. This person said that Tuesday’s statement should not have described the factory lists as “in progress,” because all the founding group members submitted their lists in time to meet the deadline. She added that the group considers its initial proposal for building standards to be complete; the standards are to be finalized by November 10th.

On April 24th, the eight-story Rana Plaza complex collapsed in Dhaka, Bangladesh, killing more than eleven hundred people. It was the deadliest accident in the history of the garment industry. Five months earlier, a fire at the Tazreen Fashions factory, also in Dhaka, killed more than a hundred people who were unable to escape flames that fed on piles of yarn and fabric, as The New Yorkerdescribed.

The death tolls raised awareness about the hazards faced by apparel workers in Bangladesh, but the problems are neither new nor surprising. “For over two decades, there have been substantial concerns about working conditions, particularly worker safety,” said Aron Cramer, the president and chief executive of B.S.R., a consulting firm that works with businesses on social-responsibility issues. “The commitment—in Bangladesh and outside—has not been there to ensure safe and fair working conditions.”

Within Bangladesh, reporters have found factory managers who still resist workers’ efforts to organize. This week, the Wall Street Journal told the story of a garment worker who claimed that pro-management employees attacked her with cutting shears; the managing director of the factory dismissed photographs of her injuries as fake “artwork.”

After the Rana Plaza disaster, clothing companies organized themselves into two groups: the Alliance, and another group called the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh. The camps disagreed on the appropriate role of unions in Bangladeshi factories, among other things. Both groups vowed to improve worker safety in the country’s clothing factories, but they felt differently about how to do it.

The first group was created in May and was made up of mostly European retailers, including Carrefour, Tesco, and H&M. That group’s partners include trade unions, such as IndustriALL and UNI Global Union, and the International Labour Organization serves as the independent chair. Their “Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh,” published in May, establishes a plan for factory inspections and guarantees that funds will be made available for safety upgrades.

The Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety, meanwhile, was established in July, and is now beginning to publish its own guidelines. The Alliance is comprised of companies that balked at some of the Accord’s requirements, including its provisions for arbitration. It says it has consulted with organized labor, but there is no union representative on its board.

Activists are exasperated by the existence of two groups with the same fundamental mission. Having separate initiatives is “absolutely the wrong approach,” David Schilling, the senior program director of human rights and resources at the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, told me. “Long-term, sustainable change within the garment sector of Bangladesh is going to take a unified effort.” For their part, the companies behind the Accord and the Alliance say they plan to coördinate their safety standards.

The clothing industry is divided over what, if anything, Western companies owe workers in Bangladesh, one of the world’s largest apparel exporters. On Thursday, a planned meeting in Geneva on creating a compensation fund for victims of the two factory accidents drew just a third of the retailers that used the factories, the BBC reported. Only one company, the Irish retailer Primark, a unit of Associated British Foods, publicly committed to paying victims and their families.

In the two years after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire killed a hundred and forty-six garment workers, in 1911, public outrage spurred major improvements in factory safety. Dozens of recommendations from the Factory Investigating Commission, established by the New York state legislature, became law, including higher standards for building exits and an increased availability of fire extinguishers. In a civil suit adjudicated in 1913, the Triangle Waist Company was ordered to pay seventy-five dollars per deceased victim.

The global nature of the modern apparel industry makes coördinating such efforts more difficult, and everyone agrees that the problems in Bangladesh, including corruption and lax enforcement of local laws, will be difficult to uproot. “Bangladesh represents a real challenge, because the reputational risks are high and the costs of making the industry safe are not insignificant,” said Scott Nova, the executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium, who has been critical of the speed with which U.S. companies responded to the Rana Plaza and Tazreen disasters. Yet those companies have the resources to create meaningful change if they choose. The Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety has pledged forty-two million dollars for an initial worker-safety fund, and another hundred million in low-cost capital available to factories for funding safety improvements. Last year, Wal-Mart’s net sales were more than four hundred and sixty-six billion dollars—more than four times the gross domestic product of Bangladesh.